Anomalous Writing as Memories of Trauma: War and Women in Hong Mai's Yijian zhi.

This article examines accounts of women during war and social turmoil in Hong Mai's (1123-1202) collection of anomalous occurrences, the Yijian zhi (Record of the listener). Recent scholarship, relying on Song-period women's biographies, contends that the wars of the twelfth century contributed to Southern Song elite men's increasing efforts to analogize female fidelity to men's political loyalty in China since the Song. This article conveys another dimension: the emotional trauma of Southern Song society's war-time experiences. Such reading unveils at least three types of Yijian zhi accounts on women during war: the model virtue type, which falls neatly into the heroic women narrative tradition; the moral uncanny type, which features the scary side of righteous cruelty; and the lighthearted joking type, which mitigates the intensity of the traumatic experience of displacement. An examination of female fidelity in these eclectic accounts suggests that gendered moral discourses attached to women's biographies do not fully reflect how Southern Song society remembered women's suffering during national crises. This article demonstrates that, struggling to come to terms with the aftermath of wars and social disorder, Hong Mai and his contemporaries were still in the process of grappling with the tenet of female fidelity and its implications for men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]